


Notung! Notung! Neidliches Schwert! (original version)

by ars_belli



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood Kink, F/M, House Lannister, Orgasm Delay/Denial, This fic is dark and full of terrors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-04
Updated: 2014-04-04
Packaged: 2018-01-17 20:10:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1400908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ars_belli/pseuds/ars_belli
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>My father's steel<br/>yields truly to me;<br/>and I'll forge the sword myself!<br/>…<br/>It must be splintered<br/>and ground into shreds;<br/>what is broken, this way I mend.<br/>— Siegfried Act I<br/>One take on the post-S3E10 reunion, the Wagner remix.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Notung! Notung! Neidliches Schwert! (original version)

**Author's Note:**

> I have kept the original fic here, but am moving forthcoming chapters to [a new work.](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2044992)

SIEGFRIED:  
Notung! Notung!  
Neidliches Schwert!  
Was musstest du zerspringen?  
Zu Spreu nun schuf ich  
die scharfe Pracht,  
im Tiegel brat' ich die Späne.  
  
Einst färbte Blut  
dein falbes Blau;  
sein rotes Rieseln  
rötete dich:  
kalt lachtest du da,  
das warme lecktest du kühl!  
  
Warst du entzwei,  
ich zwang dich zu ganz;  
kein Schlag soll nun dich mehr zerschlagen.  
…  
nun lacht ihm sein heller Schein,  
seine Schärfe schneidet ihm hart.  
  
Tot lagst du  
in Trümmern dort,  
jetzt leuchtest du trotzig und hehr.  
Zeige den Schächern  
nun deinen Schein!  | SIEGFRIED:  
Notung! Notung!  
Sword of my need!  
What mighty blow once broke you?  
I've filed to splinters  
your shining steel;  
the fire has melted and fused them.  
  
Your steely blue  
once flowed with blood;  
its ruddy trickling  
reddened my blade;  
cold laughter you gave,  
the warm blood cooled on your heart!  
  
Snapped into two,  
once more you are whole;  
no stroke again shall ever smash you.  
…  
for me now you laugh and shine,  
and your gleaming edge will be keen.  
  
You lay there  
so cold and dead,  
but shine now defiant and fair.  
Let every traitor  
quail at your gleam!   
---|---  
  
  


She would have to splinter him apart. Bending muscle and bone to her will, firing his heart and his mind into molten gold; that might save her brother. What use was the creature he was now: weaponless, honourless, leaderless? The Lannisters had given up a god and the Starks had given them a corpse. Yet the Seven always rose anew: could she not resurrect her twin from his ashes too?  
"Keys?" her brother asked.  
Cersei blinked, shook herself. She twisted a key which no woman had held before into a lock which guarded a room few knights had ever seen. Jaime pressed his palm against the wood, shoving open the heavy door. Out of habit he entered before her, scanning the room, resting the spectre of his hand upon the hilt of an absent sword. She felt a pang of grief. Her brother whistled.  
"Well, _fuck me_."  
"That can be arranged," she laughed, "Such succinct approval, dear brother."  
His silhouette moved from the doorway.  
"I would approve more if there were somewhere to sit," Jaime muttered. "Nearly two years chained in a cage, a thousand miles through every hedge in Westeros, yet the most exhausting part was climbing every step in the White Sword Tower."  
  
The queen walked into the quarters of the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard and was immediately attacked by the decorating scheme. The arms mounted on the walls were so well-polished that the sunlight reflecting from them became a weapon itself. The evening's dying sun bestowed upon the whitewashed walls the yellow heat of a forge.  
"I feel even filthier in the midst of this," her brother continued.  
He poked his head around a door.  
"Have any Lord Commanders died from slipping and cracking their skulls open on all that white marble? Fortunate for me that the bath fits two."  
Cersei fled from the question in his eyes, entering a door at random. How ashamed he had looked, when she had set eyes upon him the first time...  
"Bedchamber," she called. "Care to guess the colour?"  
The squires had already been and gone, turning down the sheets and providing new candles for the lamps. She decided not to tell about the lone chair. It would be unfair if only one of them had to stand.  
  
Cersei returned to find her twin at the window, staring blankly over the ocean. She pressed close into his back, her chin settled comfortably on his shoulder. Her arms closed around him out of habit.  
"Casterly?" she asked.  
He nodded. His melancholy posture posed the question for him. _How long since we have been home, sister?_  
"Too long, as always," she said.  
"Tommen's age and nine months, you mean."  
Something of his old self gleamed through the dirt. Cersei dared to slide her hands to his wrist and the bandages at the base of his stump. He whirled, dislodging her hold.  
"Sorry." He cast his eyes downward rather than holding hers. "Reflexes."  
It was a far cry from her last sight of him in the same stance. _The war for Cersei's cunt_ , he jibed in her mind. That smug flash of a smile, the laughter when she struck him, how fast he had held her. Had that arrogance been tossed aside with his sword hand? How many dreams had slithered into her mind in the darkness of night? She had but to close her eyes to conjure up the dense, spongy thud of her brother's weeks-old head bouncing along the Small Council table, spatters of rotted flesh and dried blood following like a bride and her train; but no nightmare had brought her this, never the loss of what had made him _hers_. She swallowed, shivered; felt the thin line of his mutilated arm around her shoulder to be a thousand times stronger than any soft, stifling Lancel's embrace.  
"Sister?" he asked, one hand (the only, now) warmed between both of hers.  
She longed to snatch them away; to dig her nails into his shoulders until they straightened again; to shove him onto that unerringly white bed and fuck away that terrible, wounded stare.  
"My poor brother."  
Instead she lifted his hand to her lips, kissing the inside of his wrist.  
"What happened, afterwards?" she asked.  
He shrugged at her morbid curiosity.  
"I expected it to hurt. It didn't, quite. I kneeled in the dirt and silently cursed our father for giving me up for dead and bounced every swear word I knew from one side of my skull to the other. I bled all over some Northman's shoes. At least I didn't scream."  
His head lifted slightly from his inspection of the floor.  
"I wouldn't...give them the satisfaction. I did give Lady Stoneheart and that grey old cunt Karstark a piece of my mind. I tried turning them at each other's throats while their king was away."  
She balanced on her toes, leaning into him, darting the barest press of her lips against his cheekbone.  
"So we have you to thank for splintering the Young Wolf's alliance? You're not completely useless, then."  
He grimaced, a twist of the lips to put hers to shame.  
"I'll wager a hundred dragons that Father says the same thing! 'Lannisers, Lannisters don't squander their opportunities to exploit weakness. Lannisters don't act like fools,'" he rasped.  
She forced a laugh. Father had always been markedly more amusing when safely absent.  
"I'm sure that I can deflect his ire in my direction, should you want my help."  
"Seven Hells, Cersei, he'll be furious enough to breathe wildfire! 'Ser Jaime Lannister, Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, Warden of the East, heir to Casterly Rock by my father's will,'" he mocked. "Well I can't hold a sword, I'm not strategist enough to protect the Vale with arms nor diplomatic enough to protect it with words and I can't wield a pen with the skill to balance Casterly's books. In my father's eyes, I am now _useless_."  
He choked on the last word. In the space of his indrawn breath his eyes flew from the floor to her face. _And in yours?_  
"Why should I answer that?" she snapped.  
He was silent. Whether for a long time or a single moment that drew itself out like the rapidly-encroaching shadows on the walls, the queen did not know. She dislodged his arm and stepped away.  
"We've never lied to each other. Why should I start now? Did you expect me to pour honeyed words into your ears and kiss everything better?" she snapped.  
Her long fingers convulsed at her sides. They seemed to have a mind of their own, reaching to tear off his rags and trace the hollows of his ribs and the scars on his body. It had been years... Cersei balled her hands into fists, resisting.  
"I had rather assumed that some gratitude might be in order. Two years rotting away for that bastard son of ours!"  
She ignored the slight. Jaime's temper was not unfounded. He needed salve to smooth over his mental wounds, to give her father his heir and her son his protector. Cersei alone could do it. Her father's sword yielded to no other, after all.  
"You know what I want, don't you?"  
 _Us. Our son king in Westeros and our daughter princess in Dorne and our father Hand. Our union, our legacy, ever-living!_ The words began to trickle from her thoughts to her tongue. But what sword, once repaired, swung as truly as when it had been whole? Why bind the pieces of him together? If she had the fire to melt and recast him…  
"I don't care what you want—or what you might like to hear."  
Had her callousness drawn blood? Good. Once he lay in splinters she could forge him anew.  
"I know what you need too."  
His eyes probed her face cautiously. It would be no effort at all to cup his cheeks and kiss him into silence and curl him into her arms. Instead she drew back her hand and hit him.

The twins were evenly-matched even in their deficiencies. His beard scratched against her palm in absorbing a blow, her fingers knotting viciously in his mane to prevent him from dodging the attacks, every vain twist of his body flaunting the silvery glint of another scar. A cruel jape of the favourite tactic which he could no longer use with only a single hand, its fingers striking against flesh which cushioned the sharp elegance of her bones more than he had remembered. His teeth marked skin in whose sweat tugged the sinister undercurrent of wine, of Robert.  
  
The memory propelled Jaime back into the royal bed, banished to the edge by the slumbering mass of the king—hardly the vision spun to the commoners—a precarious fuck forever on the edge of falling, faces pressed to stifle their moans into sheets slippery with silk and pillows sour with the odours of wine and unwashed monarch and essence of lavender. He surfaced from the memory like a half-drowned man. Perhaps he was still drowning, drowning in her, less certain with every gasped curse and scrambling clutch whether they were fighting or fucking. Her fingernails drew blood the length of his back, stilling him enough for his sister to force him into her.  
  
The moment he was inside the world tilted on its axis. The effortless, familiar _right_ of it made him dizzy, left him fainting in Brienne's arms, tainted by the shame of his weakness and perhaps the flickerings for other things too; but the memory splintered and shattered with every gasp of _Jaime_ from his sister's lips, fierce and desperate enough to match their coupling. No, the world was not tilting madly awry but righting itself: everywhere measured with respect to that empty, wet void they strove together to fill and time calibrated only by the metronome of _Jaime, Jaime, Jaime_. Never _Kingslayer_ , not to her, no more than he called her _Your Grace_. Eye to eye, mouth in mouth, skin against skin; what use were mere titles, what meaning in describing the disparate halves of a unified whole?  
"Sweet sister," he groaned, the words dragged from his lips as she came, while he shuddered in ecstasy himself. Only after she moaned against him a second time did he utter the syllables trapped between mind and tongue for so long, a name he had dared not even think to himself lest his longing form whispers of its own.  
"Cersei."

Her name lingered on his tongue, all smooth and bitter elegance to rival any ambergris brew. _Worth its weight in sapphires_ , echoed some distant Lannister: Gerion, perhaps, who had gone adventuring and never come back. Was he stranded on some distant isle watching the family and its name crumble into dust? _Fool's errand!_ his father had said, but he pushed that voice away too: surely he would hear worse in the morning. _I need you to be the man you were always meant to be_ , a calloused hand on his cheek, all the more terrifying for its alien familiarity, _Not tomorrow, not next year_ , but two years had passed in worthlessness: had Karstark not confirmed as much with a single sweep of steel? _Seven Hells..._  
"Jaime?"  
Fingertips warm at his cheek. Gentle, almost, were it not for the threat of her nails. His gaze wandered lazily to hers, over the Meereenese knot of their limbs, the bruises which he had kissed into her flesh, all left-handed marks now. _Robert_ , snickered his conscience, _He marked her too_. Jaime shifted his weight against the wall, the rough stucco scraping against his shoulder blades. Had he left dirt on it? Dirt and blood? Just blood? He tried to drag out a memory of them being this careless before and surviving. _While Robert lived, no-one suspected._ His brain came up empty-handed. _Except Jon Arryn and poor, dead Ned._  
"Tell me," Cersei murmured, words traced by his fingers along her lip.  
"I dread the morrow."  
Loose strands of her hair danced in his exhaled sigh. He had never been any good at lying to her. A phantom smile lingered on her lips. Sympathy, he hoped.  
"Our father is still the coldest thing south of the Wall! I _told_ you, did I not?"  
Her words were punctuated with a slap of his shoulder.  
"I said that you should see him now. Get it over and done with! But no, the prodigal son insisted on delaying his return… Gods, can you imagine what lies Tyrion will be slande--"  
Tiling his head, he bit her lip softly. Jaime found himself grinning at how easily the tirade had been pre-emptively destroyed.  
"Not interested in my advice, I see," his twin remarked wryly.  
Was that a pout, or had the petulance been all tone?  
"Why should I want your mouth for words, sister?" he laughed. "You give those to anyone."  
One hand still on his cheek, she curled the other into the nape of his neck. Edges pricked his skin, her nails drawing the shadows of the Iron Throne against his back.  
"Tell me what you do want then, dearest brother."  
His smile faded like the last autumn sunlight.  
"I do not know. What does a sworn sword without a sword arm want? What does he do?"  
The frown rested too lightly on her brows.  
"You're no mere sworn sword! Or are you not a Kingsguard? _The_ Kingsguard, now that you are Lord Commander."  
"Perhaps not, by tomorrow. Ser Barristan's failures were nothing to this. Father will be pleased."  
Somehow the phrase didn't emerge as matter-of-factly as he had wanted. He arched an eyebrow.  
"Unless you will be my champion at the Small Council?" he continued.  
Longing plucked at his heart. Never again would he ride into the melee, never crown her as his queen of love and beauty, never defend her with more than the threat of his once-bloodied white cloak. Her lips toyed with the pretence of a smile, discarding it for a surer weapon.  
"Not if I must wear your armour," she teased.  
"Were you to wear my armour, I fear that I might have to wear your dress."  
Her turn to raise an eyebrow.  
"I _distinctly_ recall a time when you liked wearing my dresses."  
"When we were _seven_ —" he protested.  
"—And we giggled uncontrollably at all the maesters because they never noticed the exchange—"  
"—The maester-at-arms did, you always hit people more often that I—"  
"—I still do!"  
The smile which touched her lips flamed into laughter in her eyes. His sister's palms traced the planes of his face; a newer, sharper geometry of fatigue and famine; her eyes following in mock appraisal.  
"Now, I am afraid, you would look _quite_ ridiculous! Although I do wonder what my high shoes might do to such shapely legs..."  
They were entwined with hers, thighs bracketing his sister's while the backs of his legs brushed her own and her kneecaps pressed into the plaster.  
"No more ridiculous than you!"  
He swatted at her fingers by reflex but only caught them by the empty air above his stump. Her fingers left his face to pull his arm tightly around her shoulders. His jaw clenched to ward off the sudden trembling of his lip. She filled the gaping pause with the lightening-bolt flicker of lips against lips. Such chastity, as soft as he was inside her.  
"Come now, there must be one redeeming feature about my dress sense..."  
But the jibe draped heavily about her words instead of taking flight.  
"That...let's see...that it makes me want to rip off your dress all the faster?"  
This laugh was genuine, as unexpected as the crooked twist of his own lips. Her teeth flashed in the evening light, pressing at the corner of his mouth, working along his jaw, biting at his earlobe. He willingly retreated to familiar territory.  
"What are you going to do to stave off the time when I have to put it on again?" she whispered.  
His muscles betrayed him. His grin twisted into a yawn. Laughing helplessly against her cheek, he never had a chance to attack first.  
"If I am that hideously boring, I'll leave then!"  
She lifted her face just enough for him see the feigned dismay on it.  
"Was that tow-headed plank really so much more stimulating?"  
"Why would I have seduced the humourless virgin when I could have had the widowed she-wolf instead?"  
"Poor Lady Stark!" she mocked. "Not that her expectations would have been high."  
"No," he agreed. "I don't expect that Lord Eddard knew his way around a woman's body very well."  
"What, one offspring every time they shared a bed?"  
"No wonder she was helpless to resist a chained and filthy Kingslayer," he parried.  
"You say that as if there times when you are not filthy!" she countered.  
Laughing at his appalled expression, his sister nuzzled softly into his neck.  
"Sleep with me," she breathed against his skin. "Don't you dare banish me to my cold, empty bed, not when I can warm yours."  
"Astonishing, I had marked success with the same line on Lady Stark."  
He stroked her hair, turning serious.  
"When have I ever abandoned you, sweet sister?"  
  
He held her as best he could with only a single hand, grateful for the tightness of her legs about his hips and her arms entwined around his shoulders. He swayed uneasily across his unfamiliar quarters. In the bed-chamber Barristan Selmy's presence frowned upon him from every shadow.  
"Not nearly as cavernous as the royal bed, I do apologise."  
Despite that, the pale expanse of plain linen seemed more intimidating than the black and gold opulence of the royal silks.  
"Not nearly as uncomfortable, I hope!"  
The floor seemed to slide ever-so-slightly out from beneath his feet. Hastily he sat both of them on the bed.  
"I ought not have spoken so carelessly."  
With their foreheads pressed together so, Jaime tasted his sister's apology more than heard it.  
"I ought not have been so careless either, coming inside you. I never thought I would mourn Robert!" he laughed.  
But his mind would not be diverted. _Uncomfortable._ Their short-hand in the viper's nest of the court by day, transcribed in the rare evenings within the safety of her chambers: lying awake to Robert's snoring; smelling Robert's wine-soaked vomit over the rugs; sleeping pinned under Robert's sweaty, immobile bulk; fighting Robert's wild, inebriated rages; not fighting when years decayed them into Robert's torpid fumblings beneath her nightclothes; enduring Robert's dead she-wolf honoured loud enough for the Kingsguard outside to hear. Now only the worms ate at Robert instead of his obsessions and no Baratheon would sit on the Iron Throne ever again.  
"There's no danger, unless we are caught," she whispered.  
She broke apart, mouth returning to its earlier course. He felt his pulse speed under his sister's lips, the same pulse which had drummed out _Aerys_ at the sight of his son on the throne. He shuddered. Gasping for air, Jaime found himself standing, unable to drag his eyes from the perfection which had so haunted his dreams, yet unable to move himself any closer.

Cersei sprawled amongst the sheets, mourning the sudden void where her brother had been. Spent, admittedly; artless even when he had been hard—a measure of their shared desperation that such raw need had satisfied either of them—but unifying them nonetheless. Her confession to Ned Stark bit at her: _When he is inside me, I feel whole_. She stretched the length of the bed against the emptiness inside. _Have patience_ , she instructed herself. The queen knew the picture she presented, the last of the evening sun spinning her hair into flame-licked gold and the shadows smoothing the lines from her flesh. _A statue of the Maid breathed into life_ , her brother had called her that first time, while the pair of them drowned in the moonlight and the dull roar of the surf at the base of the cliffs and the taste of the salt spray on each other's skin. And he… Gods, no image of the Warrior had ever shone in such white armour. No stonemason had crafted as elegant a form as the brother who had writhed above her while they tainted his white cloak with her maid's blood.  
"No woman has ever lain in that bed."  
She focused her wandering mind on the figure standing beside it. The heat of his attention lingered.  
"Kingsguard have been executed for fornication before."  
"My dear sister, you know just how to encourage me," he remarked wryly. "Never in the White Sword Tower, however."  
"Never in three centuries? Not even Elia and—"  
His face silenced her. No wonder the white cloaks were sworn to celibacy, given the chance of them talking in their sleep! She had a night, a small eternity in which to mend her other half. The queen could afford to conceed for a little while.  
"Even were I to recall a night when we dared to spend the entirety of it together—which I cannot, I admit!—you would not relent, would you?"  
It was some minor victory that he took the hand she extended to him, a greater one when he pressed it to his lips. The leonine mane swayed as he shook his head.  
"This is…different. Means something different," her brother ventured.  
 _Good_ , she thought. Were it not for her, Jaime would have swapped his white cloak for a black one. No-one else but she would have dared convince Robert to countermand the Lord Commander's wishes. Seventeen years she had waited to dismiss Selmy, to avenge her brother. What better way to cement the debt than to make him break the Lord Commander's vows which she had enabled him to swear?  
"Would it mean less if we were to couple on the Iron Throne?"  
The sharp heat of his breath splashed against her knuckles.  
"Just the two of us," she whispered. "The queen and her knight and that vast room so silent and empty."  
She watched greedily as he swallowed, followed the motion of his throat and found her own filled with smoke.  
"My clothes falling at your feet, before the steps to the throne. You would stand there and watch as I pleasured myself--I would _make_ you stand and watch. Until you couldn't bear it another second, the sight of my soft skin pressed against the swords and the blades drawing blood at the hand between my legs, until you climbed the steps and sank to your knees before me and tore off your helm and I let you kiss the blood from my hand."  
There was blood on his lips now, red where his tongue had worked open old wounds.  
"My fingers would be slick with your saliva when I curled them into your hair. I would drag your mouth to my cunt, drive you into the cold steel pricking at the flesh of your jaw. We would undress you together, then, our hands unbuckling your plate and I would begrudge every second as you pulled the mail and padding over your head. Your tongue, your lips—you would be so _warm_ as your mouth worked. You would leave me just on the precipice, both of us as naked as the day we came into this world together."  
She clawed at the sheets in her free hand, fighting the sight of him. Leaner than before, hungrier.  
"And then, then you would bend me over the arm of the throne and take me from behind, enemy swords biting at my breasts and my stomach and your legs and the length of you as you drove into me. You would fuck your sister the way you fight, Jaime."  
She watched him yearn. Watched his eyes; the tight set of his jaw and the loom of his body and the flushed length of his erection, distilled into the closest mirror to herself.  
"We'll be caught," Jaime uttered hoarsely.  
"Will we?" she murmured.  
He released her fingers and stepped away.

Cersei drove her fist into the bedcovers in frustration. She had done her work too well, equally as not well enough. _No. You owe me —need me!— more than that oath._ Yet she had watched him walk away, had lain powerless as he fumbled at the door with his left hand and vanished. She buried her head into the pillows. The cotton did not smell of Jaime, but unlike her own bed, her mind whispered _not yet_ in place of _already_. Each night breathing in his scent had been another when she could fool herself that he would not be captured for long. Even so, the ploy which had worked endlessly as children had not succeeded so well when she wore a queen's perfume and he the sweat of swordplay, for every morning she woke to less of him and more of her.  
"I hope the buttons don't go anywhere uncomfortable."  
She stifled a laugh at his voice, biting on her lip to dam the heady mix of triumph and relief.  
"I wasn't aware that you had left me any."  
She rolled over. Her dress tangled between her legs before she pulled it underneath her and sat, legs crossed.  
"At least one of was thinking sensibly."  
Cersei slid an arm around his waist, kissing the creases that marked the boundary between his legs and hips, pointedly avoiding the splendid view in-between. His legs gave way obediently. She tugged him down to kneel on the bed in front of her, smiling at the breath hissed between his clenched teeth.  
"Oh, I was thinking, certainly."  
His words carried the sandpaper rasp of frustration.  
"About you wandering around the castle wearing my seed and our sweat and how distracting this might be."  
His kisses etched the same path along her face that she had pressed into his, branding her despite the fact that his lips were thin and his beard scratchy.  
"As were you, hmmm? You were oblivious..."

His voice trailed off into the hollow between her breasts. _I will not beg._ Cersei twisted her hands into his hair. _Not the first unkept promise you made in this position, is it?_ sneered her conscience, even as the waves roared in her ears and her brother's body looked gilded in moonlight. _No secrets, sister?_ and she had laughed at him, asking how one soul could partition secrets into its two bodies.  
"Lancel," she confessed.  
Jaime's teeth sank hard around her nipple.  
"Lancel," she repeated, "came nearly every night in your absence, Jaime."  
His teeth marked her other nipple harder still. Cersei let her eyes fall shut.  
"I hoped that the sweat he left on the sheets would smell of you, that when we kissed he would look at me with your eyes, that his mouth would taste like yours, that when I pinned his wrists to the bed he would fight, that I would be wet as if I were with you, that he would fuck me the way you fucked me."  
She sounded light-headed, even to herself. Had it really been two years since she had licked some Stark retainer's blood from his neck and trapped his fingers and his body underneath hers? Two years reliving that last coupling, when she had felt his muscles tremble from over-exertion, even while all her strength could barely restrain him as she ground him into her bed? His tongue worked in quick, vicious strokes. Her hips arched into thin air.  
"I needed someone, Jaime, I wanted you at my side and in my bed, I needed you, and you weren't there, even at Blackwater, Gods, I didn't want to sit caged and helpless, I wanted to be out there fighting, with you my soul could have fought and yours could have given my body the strength to be imprisoned in the Red Keep, and instead of the Kingsguard who deserted Joffrey your white cloak would have kept him safe."  
She found herself stroking his hair, accusations coming in whispers, her traitorous eyelids seeping tears.  
"I sat on the Iron Throne and knew that when Stannis saw my body, the Stark boy would deliver your head and wondered if he would bury us together."  
Admitting defeat, she opened her eyes. She let hands fall from his face, her fingernails wet with the blood she had drawn from his scalp. On his knees, Jaime cast her in shadow.  
"Lancel," Jaime echoed wonderingly. "He doesn't deserve you. What has he ever done for you?"  
"Killed Robert," she whispered dully.  
Jaime retreated to sit on his heels, knees slightly apart and hand resting on his left one. For all the picture of glacial calm he presented, his voice pulsed warm with rage.  
"How were his pleas worth honouring when mine were not?"  
"You would never have survived killing two kings! I had to force him, bribe him—"  
"—Blackmailed by your own victim? Or did you pay the debt with your body?"  
"I feared that money would not keep his silence—"  
"You feared Lancel? Lancel the ambulating cellar, the mobile Madeira cask? Tell me, is he really so dim-witted that he needs help dressing of a morning? Or didn't he have the courage, did he just slink away in the middle of the night after taking his fill of you?"  
Every vowel dripped with contempt. He reached towards her face with his stump. An oath escaped his lips. He let his arm drop, stretching his left hand to brush her cheek. She leaned away.  
"Do you imagine that I want your pity?" she snapped.  
"Pity? Is that what one calls murder now?"  
"So you haven't forgotten how to fight with your left hand?"  
"Lancel is barely worth fighting," her brother growled. "If I ever find him inside you, I will slit his throat."  
Cersei felt heat spreading through her cheeks.  
"I don't permit him to crawl on top of me and do whatever he pleases!"  
She watched the careless motion of his shoulders in a shrug. Her twin reached for her again.  
"You would spare me the dishonour of killing him from behind like a coward. At least he would have something beautiful to admire while the life seeped from him."  
He began to lick the tears from her face. A half-fled memory cast ghostly, close-mouthed kisses along her cheekbones to dam the flood of weeping for their mother. She could not recall when she had first twisted her limbs about his in response, nor when his lips had parted to memorise her face inside and out with his tongue, knew only that the two epiphanies had been one and the same.  
"You promised, Jaime. You promised me once, that you would kill everyone who prevented us from being together."  
The sudden twist of his fingers inside her replied for him. _I remember._ She cried out, an unexpected litany of _please, please, please_. He laughed, impossibly hot into her ear, every words heralding a new thrust.  
"Careful, sweet sister. We are hardly alone."  
"Are we not?"  
Some fragment of her mind was not yet theirs, still hers to command.  
"Oakheart in Dorne, Trant with the king, Blount with Tommen and Swann with our father. Just us, alone until their watch ends."  
He bit her ear softly. She could hear the frown in his voice, in the clumsy, unpracticed strokes. It was some comfort that her brother did not believe his fortune either.  
"Whom are you missing? Greenfield and Moore?"  
"Dead, both dead, just us Jaime."  
He laughed again.  
"Not doing so well at being Lord Commander, am I?"  
His fingers withdrew, tracing wetness along her spine. She did not understand how there was still enough air in her lungs to speak, not when her twin's voice was so breathless.  
"You might improve matters by obeying the orders of your queen."  
"Her Grace's orders are a little vague for my liking. Please, please, please what? Fuck you? Kill Lancel? Kill Margery the doe-eyed whore? Permit you to tie me to this bed and tease me until I beg you to suck my cock? Sit on the Iron Throne and slash your dress from your shoulders and kiss your cunt until you scream?"  
 _Yes, oh yes._ Her teeth sank into his collarbone until she trusted herself to speak.  
"Swear," she whispered. "Swear that you will never desert me, never again, that you will always be at my side when I need you."

The conjunction of their bodies pledged for him. Cersei allowed herself to fall back against the sheets. The ferocious pace her twin set would not last as she needed it, until he could never see the bed without his mind tracing her lines onto it, nor sleep alone without stroking himself and thinking of her. Every movement of his body in the half-light carried the master swordsman's grace, but he had sacrificed the perfect contours, his lean torso displaying the shared form of their bones underneath. The configuration of their bodies was awkward, with him still on his knees and her legs encircling his hips and her nails digging into his thighs in frustration. She clung to that shard of unfamiliarity amongst his sure thrusts and the molten synchronicity of their bodies. _He must break, he must break_ , her mind cried so loud that she wondered that he did not hear, but the only words her mouth could form were "Jaime, Jaime, Jaime."  
"Please," came the breathless cry to mirror her own. "I need…I want…Cersei, sister…"  
"No," she said, even as their arms would around each other and she pulled him down to lean on his elbows and catch at her hair with his fingers and press his forehead to hers.  
"No, no, I'll not have you beg."  
Her voice cracked. They fit too perfectly like this, one mind and body instead of two, her will so easily crushed by the metamorphosis. She gripped his balls until he cried out.  
"Not even to you, sister?"  
"Not to me, not if you keep your promise."  
Their conjunction burned for a small eternity before she let the darkness claim her.

She was gone when he woke. He knew: he had no need to strain to hear her breathing; to open his eyes, longing to see his reflection; to reach for her, hoping to trace the lines of his own body. Yet he did. No strand of hair lingered on the pillows, although his own passed for her length now; no lavender scent obscured the smell of him, of them; however much of her blood he had drawn would pass as his own. The emptiness made him smile: at least one of them was careful. Yet he still twisted the sheets around himself as if the shadows she might have left clinging there could be wound about him as solidly as her own flesh.  
"Fool," he murmured to himself.  
Everything hurt. Perhaps if he had a mirror to hand, he might have seen the vapid grin on his face and wounded his pride as well. Even in the bathing room, he caught the distorted twist of a smile in the ill-polished mirror along one wall. Was this the black good-humour of a man headed for the gallows? He submerged, eyes closed. She could not have left too long ago, for the bath was tepid in defiance of the autumnal edge to the cold, stone room. Dripping, he clambered out and splashed water over the small brazier. A fountain of steam gushed from the coals, warming the air, if not the water; a far cry from the sophisticated Lann's Screws honeycombing the Rock, drawing water uphill through countless secret passageways. They had never found any of them, Jaime recalled. Nor had Tyrion, which was some consolation. Impatiently he pushed away the nostalgia for home.  
"Did I not exchange it willingly for my cloak?" he asked his washing pumice.  
He scraped vigorously, ignoring the logic that it had last touched his sister's skin. Had it left any of her untouched? Or it had traced the hollows of her neck where his fingers had curled, or slipped between her thighs, where her own had replaced the memory of his while he tightened his grip and wielded his tongue to slay the frustrated cries in her throat? He had never understood why Cersei cared to dance with the Stranger when she had her twin instead—nor if she knew how it unmade him so, the trust blossoming into the dark expanse of her pupils. Suddenly he was glad of the cold water.  
"I am jealous of a rock," he laughed.  
He flung the offending pumice at the opposite end of the bath. It sailed the requisite ten feet—diagonally, alas!—and landed on the bottom of the bath with a dull _thunk_. The coals hissed their derision, converting the splashed water into steam.

Jaime sighed. He stared at the ripples dancing across the white ceiling. His thoughts moved as sluggishly as the clouds of steam refracting the sunlight in the room. The slick marble of the bath's edge was an inviting pillow. How could he possibly have slept with her beside him? _To sleep, perchance to dream_ ; or to wake, to find that his sister had dissolved on his tongue like the most fragile spun sugar, into the eternal nightmare of his dark cell. Instead he had memorised her curves with his hand, with his lips, with that dread which she never would have shared. _No threat of illusion for her. My sweet sister would never have imagined me to be so weak._ Until she had woken, false complaints about his wicked tongue dripping from her lips. She had proven the wickedness of her own soon after, fingers sure on his hips while his hand stroked her hair. There had been no awkwardness posed by his stump or his frailty or the swiftness of his coming; no constraint between them, as ever. Dawn had found Cersei with her cheek pressed against his heart and her knees drawn to her chest, the weight of her body on his torso, its form surely half-familiar from the womb; and Jaime asleep with his arms raised in surrender. 


End file.
